He wrote of Brigid Gallagher’s anger at the Irish Republican Brotherhood, of which Thomas was still an active member. Brigid blamed the Brotherhood for Declan’s death and for the increased presence of the Black and Tans, the British police force, throughout Ireland. Thomas “refused to argue the issue with her. I can’t talk her out of her opinions any more than I can ignore my own. I still yearn for liberty and Irish emancipation, though I don’t see how we will accomplish it. My guilt is almost as great as my longing. So many of the men who fought in the Rising, men that I consider my friends, are at Frongoch in Wales. And in my heart, I know I should be with them.”
He wrote lovingly of Eoin. “He is a light in my life, the glimmer of something better in my days. I’ve asked Brigid to keep house for me so that I can take care of her and the boy. Anne had no family to call on. She and I were alike in that way. Alone in the world. She has a sister in America. Parents and a brother long dead. Brigid is all the family Eoin has left, but I will be his family, and I will make sure he knows who his parents were and who Ireland is.”
He was like a father to me, Eoin had said. I felt a rush of tenderness for the melancholy Thomas Smith and read on. His next entry was months later. He spoke of the O’Tooles, of the efforts of the new overseer, and the satisfaction he felt at the weight the children had gained. He wrote of Eoin’s first words and his propensity to run to him, babbling, when he arrived home. “He has begun to call me Da. Brigid was horrified when she realized what he was saying and cried noisily for days. I tried to convince her that Eoin was saying Doc. But she refused to be comforted. I have begun coaching the little lad in the evenings. He says Doc quite clearly now and calls Brigid Nana, which made her smile just a bit.”
He wrote of the release, just before Christmas 1916, of the last of the Irish freedom fighters, as he called them. He went to Dublin to see them home and remarked at the welcome, at the change in the people. “When we marched through the streets the day after Easter, with all intentions of staging a rebellion and inciting a confrontation, the people jeered and told us to go fight the Germans. Now they welcome the boys home like they are returning heroes instead of troublemakers. I am glad of it. Maybe the hearts of the people have turned enough that real change is possible. Mick seems to think so.”
Mick? Michael Collins was known as Mick among his friends. The picture I’d seen made me think Thomas Smith was well acquainted with him. The journal was a treasure trove, and I wondered why Eoin hadn’t given it to me much earlier. He knew I was knee-deep in research about events that Thomas Smith had seemed to know intimately.
My eyes were growing heavy, and my heart had not recovered from the odd emotional toll of my visit to Ballinagar. I moved to set the book aside, and the pages fell forward, revealing the final page. Instead of a journal entry, four stanzas marched across the yellowed paper. No title, no explanation, just a piece of poetry written in Thomas Smith’s hand. It sounded like Yeats. It felt like him too, though I’d never seen it before. I wondered if it was possibly the poem about the woman who drowned in the lough, the poem the owner of the candy store had mentioned just that morning. I read the words and read them again. The lines were so filled with longing and trepidation, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page.
I pulled you from the water
And kept you in my bed.
A lost, forsaken daughter
Of a past that isn’t dead.
Somehow love from sweet obsession
Branched and broke a heart of stone.
Distrust became confession,
Solemn vows of blood and bone.
But in the wind, I hear the strain,
Pilgrim soul that time has found.
It moans to whisk you back again.
Bid me follow, sweetly drown.
Don’t go near the water, love.
Stay away from strand or sea.
You cannot walk on water, love.
The lough will take you far from me.
I turned the page and was met with the leather-bound back of the